Educational Science

Top 10 Emerging Environmental Technologies

Top 10 Emerging Environmental Technologies The big Blue Marble, Earth, as seen from space. (Image credit: NASA)Wasteful energy policies, overuse of resources, water supply shortages, global climate change, and deforestation are just some of the issues experts say need to be addressed for humans to achieve sustainable living on this...

Gambling on Global Warming Goes Mainstream

An MIT meteorologist said three years ago that he would bet money that global average temperatures would cool back down in 20 years. The quote triggered a flurry of Internet dialogues and prompted scientists to challenge each other to make bets on climate-change issues. One scientist took the wagering meteorologist,...

Caterpillars can fend off hungry birds and other predators by clicking at them, scientists now report. These clicks warn that the caterpillars will be unsavory to eat—at least, after they regurgitate a foul brown fluid. To understand the clicking and barfing, neuroethologist Jayne Yack at Carleton University in Ottawa headed...

Knowledge Makes Learning Easier

We learn better when the material meshes with what we already know, according to a new study of rats that researchers say could help explain human learning. Scientists trained rats to associate six feeding areas with six different flavors of rat food. After six weeks of training in a constant...

New Hard Drives Hold a Terabyte of Data

Just when you got used to hard drives with hundreds of gigabytes (hundreds of billions of bytes) they do it: make one with a terabyte (a trillion bytes). Yes, you can now get a terabyte hard drive on a desktop PC. Breaking the ice with a Hitachi drive was Dell,...

The Coulter Hoax: How Ann Coulter Exposed the Intelligent Design Movement

In the summer of 2006, I heard that a new book called Godless presented an insightful and devastating criticism of the theory of evolution. Although I learned that its author, Ann Coulter, is not a scientist but a lawyer turned author and TV pundit, she nevertheless appeared to be an...

Fishy Rain to Fire Whirlwinds: The World's Weirdest Weather

When Mother Nature Throws a Curve Ball Aurora borealis in vicinity of Anchorage. (Image credit: Collection of Dr. Herbert Kroehl, NGDC. Available in the NOAA Photo Library.)As if tornadoes, hurricanes and blizzards weren't enough to keep us on our toes, Mother Nature occasionally surprises us with some truly odd weather...

How Sight and Sound Can Trick Your Brain

Auditory and visual information in the brain can conspire to trick us into seeing things that are not there, according to new research that suggests our senses are more intimately linked than previously suspected. Researchers found that subjects shown a single flash of light sandwiched between two tones in quick...

World's First Tree Reconstructed

Earth's oldest known tree stood nearly 30 feet tall and looked like a modern palm, a new reconstruction shows. Workers uncovered hundreds of upright stumps of the 385 million-year-old tree more than a century ago, after a flash flood in Gilboa, New York uncovered them, but little else was known...